Richard Whittall:

The Globalist's Top Ten Books in 2016: The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer

Middle East Eye: "

The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer is one of the weightiest, most revelatory, original and important books written about sport"

“The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer has helped me immensely with great information and perspective.”

Bob Bradley, former US and Egyptian national coach: "James Dorsey’s The Turbulent World of Middle Eastern Soccer (has) become a reference point for those seeking the latest information as well as looking at the broader picture."

Alon Raab in The International Journal of the History of Sport: “Dorsey’s blog is a goldmine of information.”

Play the Game: "Your expertise is clearly superior when it comes to Middle Eastern soccer."

Andrew Das, The New York Times soccer blog Goal: "No one is better at this kind of work than James Dorsey"

David Zirin, Sports Illustrated: "Essential Reading"

Change FIFA: "A fantastic new blog'

Richard Whitall of A More Splendid Life:

"James combines his intimate knowledge of the region with a great passion for soccer"

Christopher Ahl, Play the Game: "An excellent Middle East Football blog"

James Corbett, Inside World Football

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Qatar is emerging for the second time in a decade as the
only Arab state without a peace treaty and diplomatic relations to have
invested in Israel. Qatar’s latest investment in Israeli Palestinian soccer
comes against a backdrop of a war of words between the two countries over the
Gulf state’s support for Hamas, the Islamist militia that controls the
war-wracked Gaza Strip. Yet, Qatar’s relationship with Hamas makes it alongside
Turkey the only country that can talk directly to the group as part of
international efforts to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza.

A Qatari agreement to donate $4.6 million to two Israeli
Palestinian soccer clubs, Bnei Sakhnin, a team based in Galilee that
historically stands for Israeli-Palestinian co-existence, and Maccabi Ahi
Nazareth FC, a squad that historically was part of the centrist wing of the
Zionist movement, was negotiated prior to the eruption three weeks ago of
hostilities between Israel and Hamas.

In a move that is likely to provoke Israeli right-wing and
nationalist ire, Qatar this week paid Bnei Sakhnin, which was the foremost
Palestinian team to include Jewish players in its squad, its first instalment
of the donation. Mazen Gnayem, the mayor of Sakhnin, a Palestinian town in the
Lower Galilee, and former Bnei Sakhnin chairman, told Israeli business
newspaper Globes that Qatar had transferred $500,000. Right wing and
nationalist ire is likely to feed on the fact that Bnei Sakhnin recently lost
Eliran Danin, its last Jewish player. Maccabi Nazareth however continues to
have both Palestinian and Jewish players.

Shimon Peres, who last week stepped down as Israel’s
president and is widely seen as a dove when it comes to Israeli-Palestinian
peace, accused Qatar this week of being “the world’s largest funder of terror.”
Mr. Peres charged that “Qatar does not have the right to send money for rockets
and tunnels which are fired at innocent civilians. Their funding of terror must
stop. If they want to build then they should, but they must not be allowed to
destroy,” he told Ban-Ki Moon during the United Nations Secretary General’s
visit to Jerusalem in a failed bid to achieve a Gaza ceasefire.

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s former security
advisor Major General (res) Yaakov Amidror said the United States had earlier stopped
the Amman-based, Palestinian-owned Arab Bank from transferring Qatari funds for
the payment of 43,000 public sector workers in Gaza who haven’t received
salaries for month. Gen Amidror told The Times of Israel that Qatari funding of
Hamas’ military operations continued nevertheless unabated.

Israeli economy minister Naftaniel Bennett meanwhile called
on world soccer body FIFA to deprive Qatar, which is home to Hamas leader
Khaled Mishal, of its right to host the 2022 World Cup because of its funding
of what he described as radical Islamic terror. Communications Minister Gilad
Erdan demanded that the Qatar’s state-owned Al Jazeera network be taken off the
air due to its “extremely severe incitement against the State of Israel as well
as enthusiastic support for Hamas and its terrorist actions.” Earlier, Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman denounced the network despite the fact that Israeli
spokesman, including his ministry’s spokesman, Yigal Palmor, appear regularly
on Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera was this week forced to evacuate its Gaza office after
it came under fire. The network’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Walid Al-Omari,
accused members of the Israeli Cabinet in an interview on Israel’s Army Radio
of incitement and putting its crews at risk.

Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid Al Attiyah, who has played a
key role in the ceasefire negotiations, hit back at Israel, saying that ”Qatar does not support Hamas, Qatar supports the
Palestinians.” In an interview with CNN, Mr. Al Attiyah accused Israel of
systematically sabotaging peace efforts over the past year. He lashed out at
Messrs Lieberman and Bennett, saying they “practice terrorism… Israel never
leveraged on the pragmatic approach of Hamas. Mr. Al Attiyah noted that Hamas
had agreed to participate in Palestinian elections in 2006 encouraged by the
fact that then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had asked Qatar to
support the group’s move. “They decided to practice democracy,” the minister
said.

The Israeli war of words on Qatar is designed to further
isolate Hamas, which has found little sympathy among Arab government in its
latest round of fighting with Israel, leaving the Gulf state as its main Arab
backer. By discrediting Qatar hopes to support Egyptian mediation efforts in
the knowledge that Cairo’s relations with Hamas are troubled because it views
the group as an extension of the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

Former Qatari emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani became
in 2012 the first Arab head of state to visit Hamas-controlled Gaza. Mr. Al
Attiyah said residential housing and hospitals that were being built in Gaza
prior to the Israeli assault with $500 million pledged by Sheikh Hamad had been
constructed by contractors associated with Hamas’ rival, Al Fatah, the group
that forms the backbone of the West Bank’s Palestine Authority headed by
President Mahmoud Abbas. He said the funds for Gaza were being channelled
through Arab Bank and the Palestine Authority rather than Hamas.

Qatar played an important role earlier this year in bridging
the seven-year old rift between Fatah and Hamas which led to an agreement to
form a national unity government that would be backed by both groups but would
not include Hamas representatives. The formation of that government prompted
Mr. Netanyahu to break off US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Israel’s assault on Gaza is believed to be in part intended to undermine the
government and put Mr. Abbas back in the driver’s seat, an effort that has so
far backfired.

Qatar first invested in Israeli soccer when it funded in
2006 the construction of the Doha Stadium in Sakhnin to the tune of $6 million,
the first ever official investment in Israel itself by an Arab state that has
yet to recognize Israel. The funding came after Bnei Sakhnin, Israel’s most
successful Israeli Palestinian club, won the 2004 State Cup. The team’s
captain, Abbas Suan, became a national hero in 2006 when he scored a key goal
in Israel’s World Cup qualifier against Ireland.

A week later Mr. Abbas was greeted in the stadium of
Jerusalem by supporters of Beitar Jerusalem, Israel’s most anti-Palestinian,
anti-Muslim club, with chants of “Suan, You Don’t Represent Us” and “We hate
all Arabs.”

James M.
Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute
of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the
same title.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

RSIS
Commentary is a platform to provide timely and, where appropriate,
policy-relevant commentary and analysis of topical issues and contemporary
developments. The views of the authors are their own and do not represent the
official position of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU.
These commentaries may be reproduced electronically or in print with prior
permission from RSIS and due recognition to the author(s) and RSIS. Please
email: RSISPublications@ntu.edu.sgfor feedback to the Editor RSIS Commentaries, Mr Yang Razali
Kassim.

No. 151/2014 dated 29 July 2014

Battle of the Ceasefires: Israel, Hamas Struggle
for Moral High GroundBy
James M. Dorsey

Synopsis

If Israel came close to destroying Hamas in two earlier confrontations in
2008/9 and 2012, it has succeeded in the latest round of fighting to rescue the
group from potential demise. Hamas is emerging as the key player capable of
cornering Israel politically and diplomatically despite its military superiority.

Commentary

THE
EFFORT to achieve a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip
resembles a see-saw with at times Israel and at other times Hamas rejecting a
halt to hostilities or violating a brief silencing of the guns in a bid to
ensure its collapse. The back and forth reflects in the first instance a battle
between Israel and Hamas to occupy the moral high ground.

But more importantly it highlights a growing realisation that Hamas is emerging
politically strengthened from the death and destruction in Gaza while Israel is
fighting a rear guard battle to turn military success into political victory.

Hamas forcing Israel
into a corner

Israeli spokesmen have projected the acceptance by Hamas and other
militant Palestinian groups of a United Nations call for another 24-hour
ceasefire as an indication that Hamas had been seriously damaged by the
three-week old Israeli assault. More likely is that Hamas hoped to force Israel
into a corner after Israel had rejected US Secretary of State John Kerry’s
proposal for a seven-day halt to hostilities because it would have legitimised
Hamas’ demands for a lifting of the seven-year-old Israeli-Egyptian blockade of
Gaza, the opening of all the territories border crossings, the free flow of
goods and services into the strip and the release of funds for payment of Gazan
public sector salaries.

A Hamas spokesman, hours before the group’s acceptance of the UN ceasefire
proposal, left little doubt that the Islamist militia had ensured the collapse
of an earlier 12-hour ceasefire negotiated by the United Nations, the United
States, the European Union, Qatar, Turkey and Egypt. The spokesman charged that
the ceasefire would only allow Israel to prepare its military and intelligence
resources for a second round in Gaza.

High stakes

The stakes for both Israel and Hamas are high: Israel cannot afford a halt to
hostilities that opens the door to acceptance of Hamas’ demands. Otherwise this
would invite questioning of its refusal to deal with Hamas, undercut its effort
to undermine the recently agreed Palestinian national unity government
supported by Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as well as Hamas, and
derail its determination to choke Hamas by blockading Gaza. Hamas for its part
needs to demonstrate even if the current conflagration was engineered by Israel
that the terrible toll in terms of human life and physical destruction
ultimately produced a significant improvement in the lives of the 1.8 million
inhabitants of Gaza.

With pictures of utter destruction and bodies being pulled out of rubble where
once home stood dominating television news, Hamas is gaining the upper hand.
Mr. Kerry’s emphasis on Hamas’ demands while referring in his ceasefire plan to
Israeli security concerns in only the most general of terms reflects the swing
of public empathy towards the Palestinians even if the Obama administration
continues to officially uphold Israel’s right to defend itself.

Nonetheless, the realisation that Israel could emerge the real loser from the
latest fighting is beginning to take root in Israeli government circles as well
as the country’s political and security establishment. Israeli Defence Minister
Moshe Yaalon has effectively called for an end to Israeli attempts to undermine
the Palestinian national unity government by suggesting that Abbas, who until
now controls only the West Bank, extend his writ to Gaza as part of what he
termed a reconciliation government.

Senior Israeli officials have suggested in recent days that they were never
opposed to a Hamas-backed unity government even though Israeli Prime Minister
Benyamin Netanyahu broke off US-sponsored peace talks after Abbas reached
agreement with Hamas. Ayalon was echoing a plan drafted by the Economic
Co-operation Foundation, an Israeli think tank.

Hamas’ instrument

Hamas’
demand for a lifting of the blockade of Gaza is also garnering support from
senior Israeli figures such as Yuval Diskin, the former head of Shabak, the
internal security service, who has become a dove since retiring.

“Israel is now an instrument in the hands of Hamas, not the opposite. Hamas
doesn't care if its population suffers under the attacks or not, because the
population is suffering anyway. Hamas doesn't really care about their own
casualties either. They want to achieve something that will change the
situation in Gaza. This is a really complicated situation for Israel.

“It would take one to two years to take over the Gaza Strip and get rid of the
tunnels, the weapons depots and the ammunition stashes step-by-step. It would
take time, but from the military point of view, it is possible. But then we
would have 2 million people, most of them refugees, under our control and would
be faced with criticism from the international community,” Diskin told German
magazine Der Spiegel.

Israel’s dilemma is evident. Its definition of ensuring security exclusively
through military superiority and heavy-handed repression rather than political
compromise is increasingly costing it international support, particularly in
the United States, its major ally, and strengthening calls for boycotts and
sanctions.

“I think the government may bring this problem onto the country. We are losing
legitimacy and the room to operate is no longer great, not even when danger
looms… There are plenty of people within Shin Bet (another name for Shabak, the
Israeli internal security service), Mossad (Israel external security service),
and the army who think like I do.

“But in another five years, we will be very lonely people. Because the number
of religious Zionists in positions of political power and in the military is
continually growing,” Diskin said referring to the growing influence in the
military of more religious segments of Israeli society as well as the
right-wing drift among Israelis.

James M.
Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute
of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog, The
Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the same
title.

James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological
University. He is also co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute
for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog,
a book with the same title and two forthcoming books on the Middle East and
North Africa.

The controversial awarding to Qatar of the 2022 FIFA World Cup,
the world’s most important sporting event alongside the Olympic Games, has
emerged as a potential monkey wrench for social and political change. The
tournament has to the Qataris’ surprise given international trade unions, human
rights groups and a reluctant governing world soccer body, Fédération
Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), leverage they lacked prior to
the awarding of the event to pressure Qatar to radically reform the Gulf
state’s long-criticized labour system.
It has also offered critics of the awarding a stick with which to beat Qatar. In
response, Qatar has pledged significant reform in a bid to secure achievement
of its soft and subtle power goals and fend off demands that would
fundamentally alter its political and social structures. In doing so, it is
walking a tightrope, balancing the soft power-dictated need to embed itself
favourably at multiple levels in the international community and defeat the mounting threat
of losing the right to host the World Cup with maintaining a socially and
politically restrictive system whose long-term viability is being called into
question.

Demographics,
demographics, demographics

Demographics is what distinguishes problems of labour migration to
the Gulf, and particularly Qatar, from work-related migratory movements
elsewhere in the world. Long-standing concern about the working and living
conditions of foreign labour in the region alongside
allegations of Qatari vote buying in its successful to host the 2022 World Cup have shot to the top of the agenda of world soccer body
FIFA.

Foreigners constitute a majority in several Gulf states; others
barely have a majority of local nationals. Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
nationals account for less than half of the population in Qatar, the United
Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Nowhere are the demographics starker than in Qatar
where the citizenry constitutes at best 12 percent of the population.[1]Qatar’s’ demographic deficit is likely to become even more pronounced in coming
years with an expected influx of an additional one million migrant workers
needed for the construction of vast infrastructure projects, some of which are
directly related to the hosting of the World Cup.[2]These
include the construction of at least eightstadia,
70,000 hotel rooms, a city to provide for 200,000 residents, and a road network
at an estimated cost of US$97 billion.

Labour migration in this demographic environment takes on a
different meaning from anywhere else in the world where local nationals
constitute a majority of the population. Labour migrants are always contract
workers, never immigrants. No Gulf state with the exception of Saudia Arabia
has included a naturalization process in its legislation albeit with a high
threshold.[3]The
relatively few citizenships that have been granted in the decades since
independence were issued by Cabinet decree and almost exclusively to Arabs
rather than non-Arabs. Workers and expatriates have no expectation of being
able to stay in their host country beyond the term of their contract.

For much of their existence as independent states, Qatar and other
Gulf states could pretty much treat foreign workers as they pleased. Supplying
countries like India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh were happy to
reduce unemployment by exporting labour and build foreign currency reserves
with workers’ remittances. Reports in the media and by human rights groups
regularly highlighted the plight of foreign workers in the Gulf but failed to
mobilize sustained and effective calls for change. Lack of interest in the
international community allowed Qatar and other Gulf states moreover to replace
over time politically risky Arabs, including Egyptians, Yemenis and Palestinians,
who
initially were more likely to hold anti-monarchical
and revolutionary and in more recent times Islamist views with more manageable South Asians who had less of a
stake in the region with no enforcement of international labour standards.
Asians who by and large do not speak Arabic were furthermore easier than Arabs
to segregate from the Qatari population.

Source: The
Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011, World Bank

In
a break with its segregation policy, Qatar in 2013 organized a cup for foreign
workers’ soccer teams organized by their employers. The cup served to shatter
the notion that encouraging soccer would give workers something that would lead
them to sprouting roots in their host country. A year later, Qatar Star League
(QSL), the country’s top league was debating organizing a Super Cup, in which
among others the national champion as well as the winner of the Workers’ Cup would
compete, a first step in bring the Qatari and foreign community together as
part of a policy that aimed to encourage some degree of interaction between the
country’s Qatari and non-Qatari population. Qatari sociologist Kaltham Al-Ghanim
moreover called on the country’s sports clubs to set up branches in the
Industrial Zone “to channel their energy to productive avenues and hunt for
sporting talent.”[4]

The awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar followed three years
later by Dubai’s winning of the right to host the 2020 World Expo for the first
time generated pressure on Qatar and the Gulf states and put their labour
conditions under a sustained spotlight that they no longer could ignore with
impunity. It also gave activists for the first time the leverage they had
hitherto lacked to effectively pressure governments as well as major
corporations. This was particularly true for trade unions led by the
Brussels-based International Trade Unions Confederation (ITUC), which unlike
human rights groups who wield primarily moral authority claims to have 175
million members, many of whom are soccer fans, in 161 countries.[5]The
activists benefitted from the fact that public opinion in many parts of the
world doubted the integrity of the Qatari bid because of a massive corruption
scandal in world soccer that implicated some of its most senior officials,
including FIFA vice president and Asian Football Confederation (AFC) president
Mohammed Bin Hammam. A Qatari national, Bin Hammam was banned for life from
involvement in professional soccer by FIFA in 2013 after a long and bitter
legal battle.

Caught
off guard

The corruption scandal coupled with concern about the viability of
holding the Cup in Qatar’s extreme summer temperatures and at times biased
assertions that the Gulf state lacked the size, soccer history and demography
to host the tournament sparked a sea change in attitudes towards the plight of
foreign workers of governments in many parts of the world that prior to the
awarding of the Cup did not care but that could not no longer claim that they
did not know about the conditions under which their nationals were working.
That potentially explains why the sudden concern about the plight of foreign
workers caught Qatar as well as FIFA off guard. Instead of being feted as the
first Arab state to host one of the world’s most significant sporting events
Qatar confronted an avalanche of criticism, much of it justified but much of it
also reflective of envy of its financial muscle and derogatory about its young
history as an independent, small desert state with little soccer history.

“When Qatar was pulled from the envelope in Zurich on December 2nd
(2010), amid all the celebrations and joy, we knew that the work was only just
beginning. What we did not know or expect was the avalanche of accusations and
allegations that we would face in the immediate aftermath of what was a historic
day for sport in our country and for the wider region. I’m sure all of you in
this audience are well aware of the very tough challenges we have faced since
our success last December. Baseless accusations were made against our bid. We
were presumed guilty before innocent without a shred of evidence being
provided. I want to reiterate to all of you that we conducted our bid to the
highest ethical and moral standards. We are immensely proud of the bid that we
submitted to FIFA. One that outlined a bold legacy for football development not
just in Qatar, but across the Middle East,” Hassan al Thawadi, secretary of the
Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee that was later restyled as the Qatar Supreme
Committee for Legacy and Delivery told a Leaders in Football conference in 2011.[6]

Qatari and for that matter FIFA surprise at the intensity of the
criticism of Qatar’s successful bid and its labour system nonetheless
highlighted fundamental problems in the criteria for the awarding of mega
events by international sport associations as well as with the environment in
which event hosts operate: the absence of human rights in the awarding criteria
in line with the associations’ professed values and of fans’ lack of concern
before the uproar over the integrity of the Qatari bid and the conditions under
which workers would be building World Cup infrastructure in the Gulf state.
Mass anti-government protests in 2013 in Brazil that targeted FIFA’s heavy
handed imposition of its own terms on host countries and questioned the
government’s expenditure on World Cup infrastructure as well as the key role of
soccer fans in popular revolts in North Africa and Turkey, although unrelated
to the foreign workers’ issue in Qatar, served as a warning that FIFA and other
sport associations no longer could remain oblivious to public opinion.

“FIFA and the IOC will never be properly managed, because fans
don't really care. If England wins the Qatar World Cup, nobody will give two
hoots whether the tournament was built on slave labour and bungs. Even the
possibility of winning will be enough to sweep ethical concerns aside as the
tournament draws near, while anything short will be treated, as usual, as a
national catastrophe,” wrote The Daily Telegraph journalist Ed Cumming days
after his newspaper disclosed another series of eyebrow-raising payments
between senior FIFA officials who have since effectively been banned from
involvement in soccer.[7]It was
not immediately evident that those payments were related to the Qatari bid, but
they fuelled renewed public questioning of Qatar. That was equally
true for more damaging allegations of bribery in the Qatari bid published three
months later by British newspaper The Sunday Times, which said it had millions
of documents to back up its assertions.[8]

Theo Zwanziger, the senior FIFA official dealing with the Qatar
labour issue, nonetheless conceded in testimony to the European parliament that
“we need to rethink this and give human rights a much higher status.”[9]

Pressure
meanwhile mounted on Qatar with an increasing number of media reports led by
coverage in Britain’s The Guardian of an increasing number of deaths of primarily
Nepalese and Indian workers.[10]The ITUC, Qatar’s
harshest critic, predicted that up to 4,000 workers would lose their lives in constructing
World Cup-related infrastructure.[11]Some 400 Nepalese
reportedly died between.2012
and 2014.[12]The Indian embassy
in Doha reported that more than 500 Indian workers had died in Qatar in the
last two years. Indians account for 22% of the estimated 1.2 million workers in
Qatar.[13]

The reports left multiple questions unanswered, including lack of
clarity on how many of the deaths were work-related although that was likely to
be a majority. Workers often do not have a precise understanding of the conditions
they will be working under nor do they undergo a proper health check before
their departure for Qatar. Deaths are frequently certified as resulting from a heart
condition even if it involved a work-related incident because that entails less
bureaucracy and allows companies and authorities to fend off investigations and
post-mortems.[14]

That state of affairs was implicitly reflected in a study in the
Journal of Arabian Studies that listed late wages, significant debts accrued to
pay labour brokers, and inconsistent access to healthcare as common problems
encountered by foreign workers in Qatar. Funded by the Qatar National Research
Fund, the study, entitled ‘A Portrait of Low-Income Migrants in Contemporary
Qatar’, said that 56 percent of the workers interviewed reported not having
received a government-mandated Hamad health card, needed to access free
healthcare.[15]Qatar
University meanwhile reported that the vast majority of employers in Qatar
illegally confiscated workers’ passport at the outset of their employment even
though it violates the provisions of the kafala or sponsorship system that puts
workers at the mercy of their employers will little opportunity for redress.

Source:
Arab Studies Journal

Against this backdrop, ITUC’s Secretary General Sharan Burrow
warned in 2013 that “in the next few months the contracts for the new World Cup
stadia and infrastructure will be announced. Millions more workers will be
hired from overseas for the road, rail and building infrastructure for the
World Cup. We are putting multi-national companies tendering for these
contracts on notice to abide by international law and respect workers’ rights.”[16]

Britain’s
powerful GMB trade union called in October 2013 on British construction
companies active in Qatar and particularly those bidding for 2022 World
Cup-related projects not to exploit cheap migrant labour. In a letter to the
chief executive officers of 13 British companies, GMB international officer
Bert Schouwenberg said: “We believe that UK companies have a particular
responsibility to ensure that their Qatar-based employees, regardless of their
nationality, and their sub-contractors' employees enjoy terms and conditions
within globally accepted standards of 'decent work' as laid down by
organizations such as the International Labour Organization." He charged
that workers in Qatar "face quite appalling conditions, are treated little
better than slaves and live in unacceptable squalid accommodation".The
letter was addressed among others to the construction manager of London's Shard
skyscraper, Mace, Heathrow Terminal Five builder Laing O' Rourke, FTSE 250
group Kier, Balfour Beatty which is advising Qatar on a $1 billion highways
project and Interserve that was awarded $100 million worth of contracts to help
the Gulf state exploit its vast natural gas reserves.[17]

Beyond
the reputational damage suffered by Qatar as a result of the trade union and
human rights campaign, Qatar also is also hurt economically by its labour
system despite the obvious advantages of cheap labour and a politically
malleable work force. A study by researchers of Weill Cornell Medical College
in Qatar concluded that the cost of maintaining the labour system went beyond
reputational damage. The researchers concluded that Qatar would be near the top
of the United Nation’s Human Development Index (HDI) if adjustments were made
for the country’s large population of migrant workers. With other words, the
system undercuts Qatar’s effort to project the Gulf state as a cutting edge,
21st century knowledge-based society.[18]

Running
the gamut

Union and NGO demands for reform of Qatar’s labour system ran the
social and political gamut from housing and working conditions to restricted
legal rights under the kafala or sponsorship system prevalent throughout the
Gulf that puts workers at the mercy of their sponsors to the right to form
independent trade unions and bargain collectively. The demands positioned the
World Cup as a potential agent of social and political change. Unlike in the
past when Qatar and other Gulf states could effectively ignore criticism, the
Gulf state realized that engagement was the only way of achieving its goal of
using the World Cup to build the soft power it needed to compensate for its
lack of military hard power.

The tournament embedded in an effort to build a sports sector from
A to Z was designed to project Qatar as a forward-looking, cutting edge 21st
century society that commands the soft power that goes with it. Qataris
realized the value of soft power after Kuwait in 1990 rallied the international
community to come to its aid to reverse Iraq’s wholesale occupation of the
country.

They also realized that the then existing Saudi defence umbrella would
be unable to protect them. They further understood that they would be unable to
defend their small, population-starved state that was virtually sandwiched between
conservative Saudi Arabia with whom they share their only land border and
revolutionary Iran across the Gulf with whom they share the world’s largest gas
field no matter how many sophisticated weapon systems they acquired and how
many foreigners they drafted into their armed and security forces. The sports
effort was part of a larger policy to project Qatar that includes the creation
in the 1990s of the state-owned Al Jazeera network that put Qatar on the map
and transformed the region‘s media landscape. The development of Qatar Airways
as a world-class airline helped establish Qatar as a hub linking continents.
The luring of some of the world‘s foremost universities to establish campuses
in the Gulf state and the building of cutting edge museums and massive art
purchases were all part of Qatar’s projection. All of this allowed
Qatar to project itself as an island of stability, modernity and progress in a
sea of volatility and conservatism.

The emergence of the World Cup as a potential agent of change
served the purpose of young progressive Qataris who saw it as the vehicle they
needed much like Turkey long viewed European Union membership as the
straightjacket that would enable it to enact reforms. They saw the labour in
terms expressed by a US inter-agency assessment of Qatar that preceded its
winning of the World Cup. The assessment concluded that “the pace of reform
will depend on how Qatar deals with the influx of foreign workers and the
societal changes caused by rapid progress.”[19]Engagement with trade unions, human rights groups and the International Labour
Organization (ILO) was intended to fend off demands that would radically alter
the country‘s social and political system however as much as it was to control
change and achieve soft power.

As a result, Qataris focused on the material living and working
conditions of foreign labour while evading discussion of the kafala system and
proposing government-controlled workers’ councils as an alternative to free
trade unions and collective bargaining.[20]The US
assessment of Qatar appeared to predict that approach, arguing that “there are
powerful economic incentives to paying expatriate workers low wages and
providing them with few services. Influential Qataris have an economic interest
in the existing system, and this will be difficult to reverse.”[21]A
separate embassy cable notes that “threats of increased criminal and/or
collective labour activity by third-country workers” are among the top four
priorities of Qatar’s intelligence services.[22]

Ray Jureidini, a sociologist and migration expert at Beirut’s
Lebanese American University, who advised the Qatar Foundation on its adoption
of standards noted that abolishing the kafala system would amount to a
significant overhaul of the Qatari economy. “The kafala system exists as part
of an effort by Qataris to retain control of their country. Abolishing the
system means opening up a labour market in a country where there is no labour
market. The requirement for an exit visa is partly the result of Qatar not
having extradition treaties with a lot of countries and wanting to prevent
those who break the law from simply skipping the country,” Jureidini said.[23]

Abolishing the kafala system would also pull the rug on
fundamental policies designed to ensure

Qatari control of their state and
society and preservation of their culture by effectively segregating Qataris
and non-Qataris among whom first and foremost are unskilled and semi-skilled
workers. Citing the need to protect families, Qatar bars bachelors, a reference
to primarily male Asian workers who left their families behind in their home
countries, foreign workers from living in family residential areas and from
visiting shopping malls or the bazaar on ‘family days.’ A law signed by Tamim
as crown prince mandates that employers must house their workers in designated
areas.

Some scholars as well as government critics including Qatari
activist and author Ali Khalifa al Kuwari, charge that the demographic
imbalance serves the Al Thani’s purpose because it avoids the creation of an
indigenous working class that would have strong grounds to demand its rights,
replacing it with imported labour that has no illusion of ever becoming
naturalized citizens.[24]“The great influx of immigrant workers,
regardless of how necessary they are, is a benefit to the ruler, who is keen to
treat people as temporary and readily disposable, rather than as citizens with
all their attendant rights,” Al Kuwari said in an interview with Germany’s
Heinrich Boell Stiftung. He noted that the number of Qatari nationals as a
percentage of the total population had dropped from 40 percent in 1970 to 12
percent in 2010. As a result, Qataris dropped from accounting for 14 percent of
the work force in 2001 to a mere six percent in 2014.[25]If population projections of five million
inhabitants in 2022 used, according to Al Kuwari, for Qatar’s multi-billion
dollar metro and railway projects are correct, the percentage of Qatari
nationals would drop even more dramatically.[26]

Source: United Nations 2009

“If
Qataris are unable to apply pressure to halt this growing imbalance and begin
gradual reform, their natural position at the head of society will fall away
and they will be rendered incapable of reforming the other and newer problems.
Indeed, they will be transformed into a deprived and marginalized minority in
their own land. The perpetuation of this growing imbalance threatens to uproot
Qatari society, to erase its identity and culture, to take its mother tongue,
Arabic, out of circulation, and erode the role of its citizens in owning and
running their own country,” he warned .[27]

A
report by the Doha-based Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies,
‘Foreign Labor and Questions of Identity in the Arabian Gulf,’ concluded that
fears that any degree of integration of foreigners would threaten family-run
Qatar’s political, cultural and social identity made change unlikely.[28]

“The
issues touches upon the essence of the question of the transition towards a
‘citizenship society. … In the absence of the establishment of a modern state
based on the bond of citizenship, justice, the rule of law, and equal
opportunity among all components of society, it is extremely difficult to
assimilate immigrants. … The Gulf countries, due to the delay in the
construction of the modern state on the institutional, legal and constitutional
levels, have extreme difficulties integrating the population of their home
societies – let alone assimilating immigrants,” the report said.

The Gulf state, irrespective of the analysis of the reasons and
purpose of its labour import policy, was fighting a rear-guard, uphill battle
not only because its critics were unlikely to settle for less than abolishing
the kafala system but also because as much as Qatar sought to introduce real
and at times revolutionary change of workers’ material conditions it failed to
quickly match words with deeds and refused to proactively and transparently
communicate reforms it was introducing as well as details of its controversial
bid.

Qatar’s initial response was the publishing of a workers’ charter
by 2022 Committee. The charter was full of lofty words and good intentions but
failed to translate those into practice. The committee, in its rebranded life
as the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy corrected that by adopting
in early 2014 principles[30]that
had been earlier embedded in a charter issued a year earlier by the Qatar
Foundation (QF), the state charity driving educational and social development.
It published on the eve of the European parliament hearing in which Zwanziger
testified a 50-page document setting out standards for workers to be
incorporated in all World-Cup-related contracts. The environment ministry’s
standardisation affairs department published in early April 2014 a handbook for
the accommodation of foreign workers at constructions as well as housing sites
took centre stage following visits organized by the ITUC.

The various documents – the 2022 Committee and the Qatar
Foundation charters as well as the contractual and housing standards -- focused
on workers’ material conditions rather than political demands in part because
neither the committee nor the foundation had the authority to issue nationally
binding norms and standards and in part in the hope that significant
improvement of worker’s well-being would shield Qatar from reforming its social
system or enlightened political autocracy in ways that would fundamentally the
country’s social and political structure.

Promising
reform

At the same time, Qatari officials have suggested that the kafala
system would be reformed in due course.[31]Those
changes were likely to entail shifting sponsorship of foreign workers from
individual employers to the government. They would also allow workers to seek
alternative employment without permission of their sponsor after a period of
notification. Qatar would further work with the major supplying countries to
establish regulated employment agencies to cut out corrupt middlemen.[32]

Home to Qatari progressives conscious of the need for change, the
Committee and the Foundation hoped to become role models whose norms would
under pressure from the unions and activists e adopted nationally. ”It is QF’s
aspiration that these Standards initiate a snowballing process towards
transforming workers’ quality of life and thus set an exemplary model for
treatment of workers nationwide,” the Foundation’s document drafted as a legal
agreement said.[33]

The Foundation rather than the committee took the lead by seeking
to address not only abominable living and working conditions once migrant
labour arrived in Qatar but also the recruitment process, one of the most
onerous phases of the migration cycle. Fees and commissions charged to workers
for their recruitment and travel to Qatar by frequently unethical middlemen and
kickbacks of on average $600 per head to corrupt company human resource
executives meant that workers were several thousand dollars in debt that they
needed to pay off with meagre salaries of a few hundred dollars a month by the
time they stepped off the plane at Doha Airport.

In her research in India, World Bank official Mary Breeding
“discovered that there are multiple structures, institutions, and processes for
labour migrants, recruitment agencies and employers to use in the process of
emigrating to the Gulf. There is a legal structure outlined by the ministry
(The Emigration Act, 1983, Section 10). There are also the institutions and
processes described by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Afiairs’s website. The
process in Figure 1 (above) is the legal process of recruitment. There are also
several alternatives ways operating openly, even advertised daily in
newspapers. The most common alternative form of recruitment is through a
sub-agent or “consultant” to a registered recruitment agency. While there are a
limited number of formally registered recruitment agents (app. 1835), there are
thousands of sub-agents.”

Breeding noted that only one of the recruitment agents she
interviewed adhered to the maximum fees chargeable to employees of IRs. 10,000
($200). All other recruiters she spoke to cited figures between Rs. 40,000 and
Rs. 50,000 $800-$1000). The costs are intended to cover passport, visa,
emigration clearance fees, airline tickets, mandatory medical exam, and
recruitment agent fees. “If a subcontractor is involved, he will also charge an
additional fee. The overall costs charged to a job candidate ultimately depend
on who pays for what: the recruitment agent, the employer, or the job
candidate. In the worst case scenario, the burden is entirely placed on the job
candidate to cover all fees for traveling abroad. With the one exception of the
government recruitment agency I interviewed, job candidates applying to other
agencies always end up paying between four and five times more than the maximum
a recruitment agent can charge.” Breeding wrote.

As a result, the Foundation mandated that no worker should pay for
his or her recruitment. The Foundation went a step further by sending experts
to the major Asian suppliers of Qatar’s foreign labour – Sri Lanka, Nepal,
Pakistan, India and Bangladesh -- to explore ways of rooting out corruption in
the recruitment process, including the involvement of unregistered or
unlicensed sub-agents, exploitation of knowledge of workers recruited in remote
villages and false promise made to those recruited or failure to make full
disclosures. The experts concluded that the Foundation and ultimately the state
had three options: organizing its own recruitment process from A to Z; working
with national employment agencies despite the problem of corruption affecting
many of them; or working with a small number of private sector employment
agencies that uphold ethical standards. The Foundation has so far taken its
time in deciding which of the options it would pursue. In its version of the
standards, the Committee said a template for contracts with recruitment
agencies would have to be registered with the Qatari labour ministry.

The
standards further addressed a host of issues that were at the core of the
criticism of Qatar. They included assurances that workers’ passports would not
be confiscated by their sponsors; ensuring timely payment of wages; guarantees
that workers would not be penalized for filing complaints; a hotline for
workers to file complaints; health, safety and security standards; provisions
for adequate housing; hiring of a company worker welfare officer; and a
four-tier monitoring and enforcement system. Improved standards are significant
given that lower skill labour that is attracted to the Gulf hails from rural
rather than urban areas in South Asia where wages are often similar to those in
the Gulf. Breeding noted that one recruitment manager she interviewed “captured
the essence of many interviews, noting the need to recruit in rural areas as a
result of increases in wages of Indian workers in urban areas relative to wages
of workers in the Gulf.”[36] She added that “out
of the ten employers (in Qatar) I interviewed only three realized that working
with subagents is illegal, and none of them were really versed in the legal
framework for recruitment established by the Indian government.”[37]

In adopting their standards, the Committee and the Foundation were
ahead of the labour ministry even if critics of Qatar’s labour system conceded
that rules and regulations effecting worker conditions contain much that is
positive.[38]The
ministry appears to have focused its contribution on improving enforcement of
rules and regulations that was spotty because of a lack of inspectors and
supervisors[39]and parroted the Foundation
and the Committee’s standards in a series of statements. It said in March 2014
that it had significantly hiked its number of inspectors, sanctioned 2,000
companies in 2013 and another 500 since the beginning of 2014 for labour law
violations and taken steps to improve workers’ access to healthcare and their
ability to file complaints.[40]

Qatari
hopes that the charters and standards would deflate criticism were quickly
dashed despite declarations by the ILO and Amnesty International they
constituted a step forward but noted that there was much more that Qatar needed
to do, including address kafala system.[41]

The
ITUC charged in a statement that the committee’s standards “do not deliver
fundamental rights for workers and merely reinforce the discredited kafala
(sponsorship) system of employer control over workers.”[42]The union
criticized details of the standards but reserved its harshest criticism for the
committee’s failure to address the sponsorship system as such or its more
political demands for workers’ rights to form independent unions and engage in
collective bargaining. These critics noted further that standards would stand
and fall with their enforcement.

The
ITUC rejected labour ministry supervision of adherence to the standards because
it had failed to date to stop the charging of fees by middlemen even though
they violate Qatari law. “Not a single change has been made or recommended to
Qatar’s laws that deny workers their fundamental rights. No workplace voice or
representative is allowed for migrant workers in Qatar. A worker welfare
officer appointed by the employer is no substitute for a duly nominated worker
representative,” the ITUC statement said. It dismissed the standards as an
“old, discredited self-monitoring system which has failed in the past in
Bangladesh and other countries where thousands of workers have died” – an
apparent reference to Bangladesh’s textile industry that has witnessed multiple
incidents as a result of unenforced standards. ITUC secretary general said a
year earlier that the labour ministry received on average 6,000 complaints a
year involving employers’ refusal to give end-of-service benefits and delays in
paying or refusal to pay wages, many of which were not acted on.

Denouncing
the standards as ”a sham,” the union asserted further that the standards
provided for only one social worker for every 3500 employees did not provide
details of how complaints would be handled or who would manage the hotline;
failed to set up a system to record workers’ deaths and ensure autopsies; did
not express the intention to prosecute contractors for breaches; and made no reference
to Qatar’s high summer temperatures. “Qatar has to change its laws, nothing
else will do,” the statement quoted Burrow as saying.[43]

In
responding to the criticism, Qatar officials drew a distinction between the
approach of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and human rights groups,
which were involved in the drafting of the standards, and that of the ITUC
which they said seemed keener on exploiting the situation to its advantage
rather than engaging constructively to reach a mutually acceptable solution.[44]

The
credibility of the ITUC’s confrontational approach that position it as the bad
guy in a good cop-bad cop division of labour among activists was dented in
March 2014 when it charged that the World Cup committee was not living up to
its own standards. The confederation made the accusation based on a visit to a
stadium that turned out to belong to a local club and that did not fall under
the committee’s authority.[45]

Qatar
nevertheless failed to capitalize on this. Its long-awaited announcement of
legal changes to the kafala system[46]raised more
questions than providing answers, was muddled by contradictory statements by
Qatari officials and persuaded FIFA president Sepp Blatter to cancel a
visit to Qatar.[47]The confusion
stemmed from the fact that the reforms appeared to involve a refinement of the
kafala system such as easing restrictions on exit visas and workers’ ability to
change jobs rather than an overall overhaul or abolition as the government had
suggested earlier.

It was further fuelled by the announcement that future
labour contracts would have to be in line with a model contract drafted by the
government, the terms of which have yet to be disclosed. It compounded the fact
that Qatar in the way it announced the measures failed to convey sincerity by
having a senior Cabinet official disclose the changes rather than a senior
military officer in uniform. Also fuelling doubts was the fact that the reforms
have yet to be sent the Qatari Chamber of Commerce and approved by the Shura or
Advisory Council. It was not clear how long that process would take.

The
announced reforms based on a report by law firm DLA Piper[48]that was
commissioned by the government would apply to all workers, including domestics
ones. They entailed allowing workers with a fixed-term contract to seek new
employment without having to first leave the country or seek permission from
their initial employer only at the end of their contract. They would however not
lift the ban on breaking their contract without their employer’s permission.

The
reforms further included:

nAn increase of the penalty for
employers who illegally confiscate workers’ passports;

nForcing employers to pay wages
electronically to ensure on time payment;

nEnforcing as yet undisclosed
standards for workers’ accommodation;

nStreamlining rather than abolishing
the requirement for workers to acquire an exit visa before leaving the country.
Instead of having to seek their employers consent before departure, workers
would apply through an automated system operated by the interior ministry.

Avoiding
responsibility

If
Qatar has been reactive rather than proactive in addressing labour issues,
countries supplying workers have been lax in standing up for the rights of
their nationals. The controversy constituted for labour-exporting countries a
double edged sword. On the one hand, export of labour suited countries with
high un- or underemployment whose remittances served as a source of foreign
currency. On the other, it put the spotlight not only on sub-standard
conditions in Qatar but also in the labour-exporting countries.

Writing
in The Guardian, economist Jayati Ghosh noted that it was a news agency using
India’s Right to Information Act rather than the government that took up the
deaths of Indian workers in Qatar.[49]“This apparent apathy and even nonchalance
fits in only too well with the overall approach of the Indian elite towards the
mass of its workers, migrant or otherwise. The Indian growth story has been
marked by very little employment generation. Despite nearly three decades of
rapid growth, net formal employment (jobs that provide any sort of worker
protection and are subject to labour laws) has not increased at all… When the
sheer pace of construction combines with a desperation on the part of workers
willing to make huge sacrifices to improve the living conditions of their
families, the result is a massive potential for exploitation,” Ghosh said.

Similarly,
Nepal’s Kathmandu Post argued in an editorial written by prominent journalist
Kanak Mani Dixit that the country’s government and civic society allowed abuse
of Nepalese workers to occur. “The job migrants of Nepal are entrapped not only
by the sponsor-manpower nexus but by a neglectful Kathmandu civil society and a
government that has floundered all these years when it comes to foreign affairs
and the protection of overseas citizens. The Kathmandu discourse on migrant
labour is marked by a sense of fatalism—the diffidence explained perhaps by a
fear of shaking the honey pot. The Gulf migrants are perceived as the luckier
ones, given that the poorest of all cross the open border into the employment
sump that is India,” the newspaper said.[50]

Ironically,
the Qatar Foundation’s push to overhaul the recruitment of foreign workers
could emerge as the driver of a change in attitude in labour-exporting
countries like Nepal. The pressure might force those countries to look at
reforms at home and push them to ensure improved governance and adhesion to
international labour standards in Qatar and other labour-importing nations. “It
is a delicate task that requires research, diplomatic skill and committed
activism—so that the fundamental rights of the workers are protected without
exposing Nepali workers to formal or informal bans (as happened with Filipina
workers, when Manila sought to raise their base income).. As a major labour
exporter, Nepal must come out of the fog and get involved in the accelerating
discourse. Priority in foreign affairs must be given to the relationships with
the labour-receiving countries, especially those of the Gulf and Malaysia. We
must rise from the wreckage of foreign affairs, including the appointment of
incapable political-appointee ambassadors, which has directly hurt the
prospects of citizens working overseas,” the Kathmandu Post said.

Conclusion

Labour
reform poses a far more existential challenge to Qatar given its demographic
deficit than it does in labour-exporting countries. The World Cup offers
however Qatar its best chance to tackle a fundamental problem in a controlled
and gradual fashion that at some point could threaten the nature of the Gulf
state’s society and state. Qataris recognize the threat but like other Gulf
states have no solution that would address their concerns of maintaining
control of their culture, society and state while granting a majority of the
population rights. Fear of loss of control and erosion of national identity
serves as an impediment rather than an incentive to tackle the issue head on.

The
controversy over labour conditions in Qatar has nonetheless left the Gulf state
no choice but to start addressing the issue. That may not produce definitive
solutions but opens the door to improvement of the material conditions of
foreign workers as well as to a politically and socially sensitive but
inevitable debate about the nation’s future. In standing up for the rights of
their nationals, governments of labour-exporting states would not only be
living up to obligations they accepted when they assumed power but unwittingly
would be contributing to a long overdue process of change in Qatar and the Gulf
that is likely to be painful and politically charged and will need to be
sensitively managed.

Sporticos

Ads

Soccer Results

The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer does not promote, link to or provide videos from any online sources who distribute illegal streaming content over the Internet with domains registered in the United States of America

Top 100 Soccer Sites

Subscribe To

Subscribe by Email

About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile